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25040Venturebeat.comLittle Bird’s latest update helps brands search for influential people on social mediahttp://venturebeat.com/2016/01/21/little-birds-latest-update-provides-deeper-insights-more-ways-to-find-influential-people/
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/21/little-birds-latest-update-provides-deeper-insights-more-ways-to-find-influential-people/#respondThu, 21 Jan 2016 17:00:46 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1865645Little Bird has released the next generation of its social discovery platform, complete with features aimed at helping you better find and engage influencers. The goal of the updated app is to encourage users to seek out industry experts and thought leaders and establish long-term relationships, rather than simply targeting them right before a product […]
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Little Bird has released the next generation of its social discovery platform, complete with features aimed at helping you better find and engage influencers. The goal of the updated app is to encourage users to seek out industry experts and thought leaders and establish long-term relationships, rather than simply targeting them right before a product launch.

Founded by former ReadWriteWeb coeditor Marshall Kirkpatrick, Little Bird was started four years ago as a way to uncover true influencers — no, not social-media celebrities — those who are really smart in their respective fields. Today, the company has over 200 customers, mainly across agencies and the enterprise.

One of the issues that Kirkpatrick and his team discovered was that not everyone uses the service the same way. Most just want to know who they should be following, while a smaller percentage are looking to become power users. Little Bird’s latest version should address these various needs, thanks to the introduction of several new features.

Deeper insights

Version 2.0 offers deeper insights, meaning you can now explore connections between two different lists of people or sets of criteria. The overlapping points are called network intersections, and Little Bird can refine a list of names based on multiple characteristics, like displaying those marketers that are influential in the wearables space, or tech journalists who are knowledgeable about virtual reality.

More ways to find people who matter

Little Bird has also improved its social listening capabilities, meaning that you’re no longer limited to typing in a general topic to generate searches. The new system enables queries to be made based on the last 2,000 people (the limit set by Twitter’s API) who have mentioned a specific hashtag, username, and/or keyword. You can then filter results further based on the individuals’ sub-community and content they’ve shared.

You can also search inside people’s bios, as well as looking across multiple social networks to see who is active on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and more. If you have a list of Twitter usernames in a CSV file, that can be uploaded into Little Bird. Kirkpatrick said that social listening data from platforms like Sysomos, Radian6, and Brandwatch are also officially supported. “Combining keyword listening and social graph analysis is uniquely powerful for the discovery of people with true contextual influence,” he said.

Search speed has also been greatly improved, and results are now provided in response to near real-time data. Most of Little Bird’s competitors still experience a 24-hour delay when surfacing results, but searches on Little Bird are practically instantaneous.

Introducing daily emails

As for the non-power users, or those who may not know where to begin, Little Bird offers an email digest sent every morning with links to the most important people and conversations you should be engaging with. Think of it as something akin to Nuzzel, but featuring people who are experts around a specific topic.

“The influencer marketing world is maturing, and this new version of Little Bird is the most powerful, most easy to use, smartest startup in the market,” claims Kirkpatrick. “We learned what to build by working with some of the biggest, smartest companies in the world, and now we’re excited to make these new capabilities available to all our customers.”

In the company’s first four years, it has been about helping businesses understand the role of influencer marketing, which more are probably starting to pay attention to, following the acquisition of Klout by Lithium Technologies and Brandwatch’s purchase of PeerIndex. The next phase of Little Bird’s journey is to provide its customers with the insights to easily form relationships with the right people.

As for what the future holds, Kirkpatrick said that the company is open to chatting with third-parties, such as social listening services, sales and CRM platforms, and others. He also suggested that a partnership API could go live next quarter, at which point we’ll begin seeing the first integrations.

Little Bird 2.0 comes just over a month after the company closed its latest round of funding, which brought in $2 million from the Launch Fund and existing investors. Since then, Kirkpatrick has taken on a different role in the company, stepping down as CEO to focus on his role as an evangelist.

The latest version of Little Bird is available now.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/21/little-birds-latest-update-provides-deeper-insights-more-ways-to-find-influential-people/feed/01865645Little Bird’s latest update helps brands search for influential people on social mediaWeave is a Tinder for LinkedIn, minus the sexy partshttp://venturebeat.com/2014/07/25/weave-is-a-tinder-for-linkedin-minus-the-sexy-parts/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/25/weave-is-a-tinder-for-linkedin-minus-the-sexy-parts/#respondFri, 25 Jul 2014 17:52:57 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1514135EXCLUSIVE: It seems like these days, every app is using the swiping-interface dating app Tinder made popular, and most of the time, it feels like an unnatural me-too attempt — except maybe in the case of Weave. Weave is a networking-meets-social-discovery mobile app, and it’s just raised $630,000 in seed funding to continue to grow. Professionals […]
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EXCLUSIVE:

It seems like these days, every app is using the swiping-interface dating app Tinder made popular, and most of the time, it feels like an unnatural me-too attempt — except maybe in the case of Weave.

Weave is a networking-meets-social-discovery mobile app, and it’s just raised $630,000 in seed funding to continue to grow.

Professionals log into the app through their LinkedIn profiles, and the app then presents them with a stream of nearby professionals who are presumably open to face-to-face meetings and whom they can swipe “yes” or “no” to meet. It’s truly a Tinder for professionals, and it’s currently yielding about 100 in-person meetings per day, the company says.

Weave is coming in at an interesting time in professional networking. More than a decade ago, LinkedIn gave us the professional profile and the ability to link up online and communicate internally with our network, and now a handful of companies want to add search and discovery to it, each in their own way.

The two others that come to mind immediately are Treatings and CoffeeMe, and all three are actually pretty different.

Treatings, which is currently only on the Web but plans to release a mobile app in the near future, lets people join and filter through for people of particular criteria. For example, if a fresh college graduate is exploring a career option, he or she can look for someone in the network who would be open to an informational interview about that industry. Treatings also recently partnered with New York University’s alumni network to help its members sift through and find fellow alumni in their area to connect with.

CoffeeMe is also only on the Web, and it’s a bit different from Treatings. CoffeeMe is taking the “curated, exclusive community” approach, meaning that members have to apply, and CoffeeMe carefully vets its community. CoffeeMe is currently only available in San Francisco and Seattle, Wash.

In a fun twist of events, CoffeeMe and Weave actually share a common beggining. CoffeeMe founder Hsu Ken Ooi and Ma not only co-founded their previous company, Decide.com; they and a few friends also put together the original CoffeeMe during Ma’s weekend-long bachelor party (yes, that’s quite nerdy, Ma admits). After Ooi handled most of CoffeeMe during the first few months (Ma was busy with his wedding, honeymoon, and Decide.com), Ma expressed desire to refocus on it. However, the two couldn’t agree on the vision and split off to work on their separate ideas. CoffeeMe went on in its current form, and Ma and co-founder (and bachelor weekend participant) Elpizo Choi built the mobile-based idea Ma wanted the early prototype to become.

It’s all about mobile

Weave’s main differentiator is that it’s on mobile, Ma said. Along with the similar interface to Tinder, Weave also leverage location.

“There still hasn’t been a way to replicate … coffee meetings online,” Ma said. “Location is a key factor in people meeting in-person.”

The idea is that people are close enough that setting up a coffee meeting, even spontaneously, it should dramatically increase the chances that they’ll chat and then meet.

“Today, if you want to meet someone, there are a couple of paths,” Weave co-founder and chief executive Brian Ma told me in an interview. You can either contact your network and ask for recommendations and introductions, or you can start attending networking events in the hopes of meeting people.

What Weave wants to do is add a strong layer of discovery within a relevant context. Geographical proximity and willingness to network bring in the relevance, while Weave’s recommendation engine creates the discovery.

And Weave’s recommendation engine is pretty sophisticated from what Ma describes. For example, the more a user engages with other, the more he or she surfaces in other people’s streams. Currently, users swipe “yes” once every ten profiles, a good start but there’s obviously more work for Weave to do.

Ma has observed three main ways in which people have been using Weave: Hiring, fundraising, and classic networking.

On the recruiting front, it’s used passively, with hiring managers connecting with mostly employed folks not necessarily looking for jobs but who are sometimes open to exploring other options.

He’s also observed that some investors have been using Weave to source entrepreneurs to potentially invest in.

But the networking is what Ma and his team and really spending time developing, as they’ve recently started experimenting with events partnerships. While event-specific apps for networking are already out there, these are disposable as people chuck them once the event is over. Ma wants Weave to be a permanent networking tool that can act as an event buddy each time a user attend an event. I’m certainly the first to admit I’ve used to Twitter to connect with others at events, so Ma is obviously onto something.

I’ve argued before that “people don’t want to make new friends,” and that social discovery of people only works for romantic purposes, but professional networking also makes a strong case because, just as with dating and unlike friendship, there is a clearer purpose and end goal.

Up next, the team will be using the money to continue working on the product and grow its user base. Ma also shared that Japanese users have been asking for Facebook login as it’s what people there use for professional networking, so don’t be surprise if that becomes an option eventually.

Vulcan Capital, which invested in Ma’s previous company Decide.com, led this round, with additional participation from Social Starts, Darling Ventures, WTI, and TEEC.

Weave was founded in November 2013 by Brian Ma and Elpizo Choi, and is based in San Francisco. The first iOS version launched in January 2014, with Android following in February.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/25/weave-is-a-tinder-for-linkedin-minus-the-sexy-parts/feed/01514135Weave is a Tinder for LinkedIn, minus the sexy parts'Social discovery' is not about making friends. It's about sex, narcissism, & gossiphttp://venturebeat.com/2014/06/14/social-discovery-is-not-about-making-friends-its-about-sex-narcissism-gossip/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/14/social-discovery-is-not-about-making-friends-its-about-sex-narcissism-gossip/#respondSat, 14 Jun 2014 20:27:25 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1491887“Social networking is what your social life looks like today, and social discovery is what your social life might look like tomorrow,” said ReadWrite editor-in-chief Owen Thomas during his opening remarks at Wednesday’s Glimpse Social Discovery conference. In simpler terms: Social discovery is an Internet company’s attempt at suggesting you things you don’t but should […]
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“Social networking is what your social life looks like today, and social discovery is what your social life might look like tomorrow,” said ReadWrite editor-in-chief Owen Thomas during his opening remarks at Wednesday’s Glimpse Social Discovery conference.

In simpler terms: Social discovery is an Internet company’s attempt at suggesting you things you don’t but should know, based on various factors including other people’s tastes and algorithms.

After chatting with a few different people in the space and even attending the event in San Francisco, two things became clear: As with everything, mobile is the next frontier, and location is the “it” factor. Second, people don’t want to meet new people — unless it’s to “date” them (for varying definitions of the term “date”).

Location because of mobile

“Mobile changes everything. We have a device on us, it’s much more of personal,” said Tagged cofounder and chief executive Greg Tseng in an interview with VentureBeat. “And I think that mobile makes the social discovery opportunity even bigger.”

Unlike desktops and even laptops, which people often share, phones are usually a one-to-one ratio. Each people has their own, it’s personalize to their taste, it’s almost always with them, and so on.

In the case of shopping, mobile devices not only mean a whole different user interface and experience, but also a new realm of possibilities — location being a very important one.

“Yes, we are an online site, and previously you had your wireless laptop, and that’s how you shopped. Now you have your phone,” said Zappos head of Mobile Aki Iida to VentureBeat in an interview. Zappos has both a mobile site and a mobile app.

“Now you have customers going anywhere and accessing Zappos anytime. Previously, we knew that people were sitting at a desk and looking at things. Now people are on the move, and while they’re out there, things may inspire them to shop for a product,” he added.

While Apple’s iBeacon is not something that would be of much use to Zappos as it doesn’t have brick-and-mortar stores, the idea that location gives clues as to what a Zappos customer could be thinking about purchasing is very real.

Tagged, a social discovery network, is also in the process of leveraging mobile and its ability to add location to equation. The company is currently revamping its mobile app, as half of it traffic happens on mobile. Mobile also means it can leverage features such as “Meet people nearby,” adding even more likelihood of a connection between folks on the network.

Along with gamifying the profile browsing process and a very focused way of evaluating profiles (read: based on their picture), Tinder also capitalizes on location, feeding people a stream of potential matches that are reasonably nearby.

This is important. The idea of getting matched and striking up a conversation with someone in a different city, state, country, or even continent is not appealing when seeking romantic matches. It eliminates the core aspect of a romantic relationship, which is the in-person hangout.

Alex Capecelatro and his team built At the Pool, a social networking and discovery app created specifically around the idea that people would want to connect with folks that are nearby, either because of mutual interests or because of an event or activity happening close by. Again, people nearby that you could potentially meet up with easily and continue vibing with.

Ironically, Capecelatro and his team are now leaving At the Pool behind (though taking its content and data with them) and will soon release a new app called Yeti. More about Yeti in a bit.

People don’t want new friends

This is probably the topic where there is most disagreement.

If you ask people like Tseng, he will tell you that while helping people connect with others and make friends is difficult, it’s not impossible. It just requires a good recipe of interest-based engagement plus a few more ingredients, and voila — people making friend connections. Tseng’s company, Tagged, launched around the same time as Facebook and spent the first three years competing with it to become the social network of choice. Then in 2007, it decided to go into social discovery and help people connect with others, mostly through common interests.

And then there’s Capecelatro’s camp.

“Making friends is not only a challenge, I just don’t think it works online… It’s not natural, it’s not what we do in our everyday life,” he said in a phone conversation with VentureBeat.

Even Tseng has conceded that “Not that many people wake up in the morning and say ‘I want a new friend.’ This need to make new friends and meet new people is a much more subconscious thing… You can’t pitch an app: ‘Here’s a friend search app.’”

Capecelatro’s app, At the Pool, sought to build a way for people to gather around local events and happenings and to hopefully make friends and connections in the process. After all, aren’t common interests, in this case events and other topics, supposed to get people to interact and eventually make new friends?

“What we realized is that none of that mattered. What they were using the app for was to post content,” not meet new people, said Capecelatro.

“It’s not that it’s my gut feeling that it’s a bad idea, it’s that the data says it’s a bad idea,” he added.

The only exception, according to Capecelatro, is meeting new people to date (or whatever). That works great — see case of Tinder.

Capecelatro’s new app, Yeti, is all about the information people were sharing on At the Pool, both location-specific (local restaurants, events, etc.) as well as location-agnostic (movies, music, and so on). The app also has a similar “swiping of cards” interface, much like Tinder’s.

“We’re not going to show you people,because its not about people anymore, we’re just going to show you content. It’s like Yelp-meets-Tinder,” he said. “We built this with the idea that most people just want to consume content”

His belief is that while people aren’t looking to make new friends through apps; they are looking for new content (e.g. Reddit) and information about local happenings (e.g. Yelp, Twitter). If personal connections, online or in person, do result, then that’s great. However, it’s not what people are looking for.

Tseng also admitted that connecting people with friends is a more indirect process. He thinks of social discovery of other people as a party: You can go to a party, maybe even a couple of friends, and either hang out with your own friends, make new ones, or none of the above. This is of course the direction he wants to take Tagged into.

But there’s still a need to connect with others, even outside of romantic relationships, but again, it’s tricky and it’s not about active looking for new “friendships,” so to speak.

“If you look at apps like Whisper or Secret, the need is just connecting with other people and engaging,” said Capecelatro.

And while one could argue that the people one interacts with on Secret are actual friends and friends-of-friends, Twitter is a perfect example of connecting and engaging with all kinds of people. I’ve found Twitter to be a place for anything from pure information, one-off exchanges, online-only “friendships,” and even friendships I’ve even taken into the offline world.

So maybe the future of social discovery is really about making your phone the perfect exploration tool as you roam around the real world.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/14/social-discovery-is-not-about-making-friends-its-about-sex-narcissism-gossip/feed/01491887'Social discovery' is not about making friends. It's about sex, narcissism, & gossipNews Feed may have clutter and ads, but they're 'relevant,' Facebook sayshttp://venturebeat.com/2014/06/11/news-feed-may-have-clutter-and-ads-but-theyre-relevant-facebook-says/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/11/news-feed-may-have-clutter-and-ads-but-theyre-relevant-facebook-says/#respondThu, 12 Jun 2014 00:30:16 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1490648Maybe money can actually buy you some relevancy on Facebook.
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SAN FRANCISCO — For Will Cathcart, Facebook’s director of product management, social discovery boils down to one seemingly conflicting concept: relevancy.

“The original philosophy behind News Feed was showing people what their friends had posted,” Cathcart told BuzzFeed’s Matthew Lynley in a fireside chat at the Glimpse Social Discovery conference here today.

As brands entered Facebook’s user feeds, even more possible feed content became available, making it even more important for Facebook to start filtering what appears in each person’s feed. But these feeds also have to be personalized.

“The types of things that go into making it more sophisticated is finding more indicators of what makes things relevant,” Cathcart said.

During their talk, Cathcart and Lynley also discussed changes to Facebook over the years and the frequent refinements of Facebook’s algorithms. Through it all, the word “relevant” came up over and over again.

While it’s easy for Facebook to figure out that you want to see content from a friend you interact with very frequently, or that you like YouTube videos because you click on almost all of them, there are more complex criteria. Cathcart offered the example of old high school friends who no longer really communicate, but one would want to see the other’s post about having a baby. An old friend’s baby is relevant news.

The idea of social discovery is to find things you’re not looking for but would benefit from seeing. Facebook’s News Feed approach seems to be about cutting out clutter but also reading your mind.

Even on the topic of advertising, Cathcart conceded that it works best when it’s — you guessed it — relevant.

“One of the ways to think about advertising and the News Feed is that our job is to produce the most relevant things for each person,” said Cathcart.

In other words: Sure, make ads and pay us to distribute them, but people on Facebook will still only care and click if it matters to them.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/11/news-feed-may-have-clutter-and-ads-but-theyre-relevant-facebook-says/feed/01490648News Feed may have clutter and ads, but they're 'relevant,' Facebook saysPinterest on the Web will read your mind now as it finally rolls out Guided Searchhttp://venturebeat.com/2014/06/11/pinterest-on-the-web-will-read-your-mind-now-as-it-finally-rolls-out-guided-search/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/11/pinterest-on-the-web-will-read-your-mind-now-as-it-finally-rolls-out-guided-search/#respondWed, 11 Jun 2014 17:49:52 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1490428It’s finally on the Web: Pinterest’s Guided Search feature, which helps you figure out what you’d like to find when you’re not even sure what you’re looking for to begin with. Pinterest, a social network on which people gather mostly images into various collections, originally announced the feature in April, first rolling it out on mobile. […]
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It’s finally on the Web: Pinterest’s Guided Search feature, which helps you figure out what you’d like to find when you’re not even sure what you’re looking for to begin with.

Pinterest, a social network on which people gather mostly images into various collections, originally announced the feature in April, first rolling it out on mobile.

“Guided search will help you discover when you didn’t know how to ask for things to begin with,” said Pinterest cofounder and chief executive Ben Silbermann back in April.

As a refresher, Guided Search works like this: If you’re not entire sure what you’re looking for, start typing the closest or first thing you think of, and Pinterest will start suggesting categories and keywords that either start with the same letters or are related to these possible keywords.

As suggested categories and words come up, you can start narrowing down your search by adding whichever ones you see and like. For example, you can start typing “dessert,” then pick out “cake,” “decorations,” and “yellow” — you’d end up with pins fitting into those concepts.

“It’s focused on discovery rather than finding,” said Naveen Gavini, who worked on the Guided Search feature, back in April.

Pinterest is first rolling out the feature in English to everyone in the next few weeks, with more languages coming soon.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/11/pinterest-on-the-web-will-read-your-mind-now-as-it-finally-rolls-out-guided-search/feed/01490428Pinterest on the Web will read your mind now as it finally rolls out Guided SearchSocial discovery engine Little Bird snags Google and Adobe award-winning marketer Carmen Hillhttp://venturebeat.com/2014/04/24/social-discovery-engine-little-bird-snags-google-and-adobe-award-winning-marketer-carmen-hill/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/24/social-discovery-engine-little-bird-snags-google-and-adobe-award-winning-marketer-carmen-hill/#respondThu, 24 Apr 2014 17:00:09 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1459080Carmen Hill, an award-winning expert in content marketing, is joining Marshall Kirkpatrick’s social discovery engine Little Bird as director of marketing. “If you know Carmen Hill, you know this is incredible,” Kirkpatrick told VentureBeat, adding, “that’s what we do at Little Bird, figure out who is super respected by their peers.” She certainly seems to have […]
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“If you know Carmen Hill, you know this is incredible,” Kirkpatrick told VentureBeat, adding, “that’s what we do at Little Bird, figure out who is super respected by their peers.”

She certainly seems to have the right stuff.

Above: Carmen Hill

Image Credit: Little Bird

Last year at the Content Marketing World conference, Hill won a silver medal in Google’s Think Digital campaign for content project of the year. She also won a silver in Adobe’s best landing page of the year contest, and then made it a trifecta of argent in Jive’s highest response rate contest for marketing campaigns.

Clearly, that’s a valuable thing for content marketers, who can then target leaders with their marketing, hopefully amplifying their messages through those leaders’ networks.

“Marshall and team have already built a solid foundation for growth,” Hill said in a statement. “I’m ready to put those big ideas into action from beginning to end.”

Kirkpatrick says the world is now ready for “serious social business,” explicitly calling out semi-competitor Klout as the opposite. Klout had been widely derided as a simple popularity contest, but has made significant steps in the past year to address bigger issues.

Above: Little Bird helps you find influencers across the social web

Image Credit: John Koetsier

“Carmen is going to help articulate the story in a way that helps even more companies get on board with Little Bird’s data driven tools for discovery for Influencer Marketing, Content Marketing, and Social Sales,” he said.

Hill is a former journalist — her Twitter bio says “recovering” — who until now has led content and social media for the agency BabcockJenkins.

Sonar taps into social networks to tell you how you’re connected to people nearby and in locations you’ve checked into. It’s part of a crowd of social discovery apps that includes Highlight and Glancee (which Facebook bought last year).

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but we’ve previously reported that the Bing Fund offers early-stage startups between $50,000 and $100,000 along with advice and design help. The investment will likely be a big help to Sonar, which has only received $200,000 in seed funding so far. It joins other Bing Fund investments in Buddy and Pinion.

“Utilizing tech in an innovative and unique way is a quality the Bing Fund champions, like many investors and accelerators do,” wrote Aya Zook, the senior program manager for the Bing Fund, in a blog post today. “But the prospect of working with people we respect and trust, and love hanging out with, is just as important when we consider companies to work with. Sonar hits all the right cords for us and we can’t be more excited that they agree.”

In its own blog post, Sonar explained how closely it has already been working together with the Bing Fund:

Sonar & Microsoft have done some fantastic events together in the past, includingPSFK’s Need to Know at last year’s SXSW, and Social Media Week, Xconomy Mobile Madness and the For Humankind gallery all in New York, so we’re particularly excited to be hooking up with the team at Bing Fund. We’ve found we share quite a lot in common; they too recognize the value of understanding location and social—the intersection of time and place—in providing customers with great experiences. They’ll be great friends to have along on our adventures in helping customers connect with the most relevant people, places and things nearby.

When I contacted Mike Mayzel, StumbleUpon’s director of communications, he said the layoffs were not the initial stages of a death spiral:

StumbleUpon is restructuring to enable the company to become more streamlined, focused and to better execute against its goals in 2013. As a result of these changes, the company will be profitable and will operate more quickly and efficiently and experiment more aggressively. We continue to grow and remain focused on providing the best discovery experience on the Web.

Unfortunately, despite all the work and innovation, StumbleUpon’s traffic graph looks like the Marlboro Man’s cigarette in the anti-smoking ads:

Above: StumbleUpon traffic, according to Compete

Image Credit: Compete.com

That’s 9.7 million unique monthly visitors at the beginning of 2012, dropping off to 5.8 million at the end of the year.

The restructuring may be about refocusing, getting quicker, and experimenting more aggressively, and being profitable is wonderful, but unless StumbleUpon can reverse this traffic decline, this layoff won’t be the company’s last.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/16/stumbleupon-30-headcount-reduction-to-streamline-focus-execute/feed/0606040StumbleUpon: 30% headcount reduction to ‘streamline, focus, execute’The limitations of social discoveryhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/06/05/the-limitations-of-social-discovery/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/05/the-limitations-of-social-discovery/#respondWed, 06 Jun 2012 00:25:01 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=468466GUEST: “Discovery” is a hot topic these days. The curse of a new buzzword is that it’s difficult to come to a shared mental model in the early stages. Instead of tackling that large problem, I’ll start with something simpler: defining “social discovery” and suggest that social discovery is a stepping stone on the way to […]
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“Discovery” is a hot topic these days. The curse of a new buzzword is that it’s difficult to come to a shared mental model in the early stages. Instead of tackling that large problem, I’ll start with something simpler: defining “social discovery” and suggest that social discovery is a stepping stone on the way to algorithmic discovery.

“Social discovery” has two definitions. On one hand, it’s used to mean services like Highlight that help you to find other people. However, the broader definition is services that help you find just about anything by using recommendations from friends.

Friends are, in general, good at recommending things, since they know you so well. However, this technique suffers from two limitations. First, as social networks grow to include people outside of one’s close circle of friends, discovery won’t be as accurate. Second, with a diverse stream of friends, you’ll probably have foodies who can help you discover new and interesting restaurants, but those same people may not be audiophiles who can help you discover great music.

The second problem can be overcome by adding a curation element; that is, a user can select a subset of friends who know about the topic in question. Though you avoid the high-school-friend-on-Facebook problem, social discovery+curation also has issues. The burden is left to the user: It’s difficult to curate each social discovery application to have the right set of people to generate good recommendations. Also, I may not have friends who have the knowledge I need. For example, I could certainly get good restaurant recommendations from friends in New York City, but none of my friends may ever have been to Tulsa, Okla.

What’s the solution for this? I’d like to suggest that we’ve already entered and are accelerating in an era of algorithmic discovery. Algorithmic discovery generates intelligent recommendations based your social network, broader social networks, and your own personal tastes and preferences:

Instead of having to worry about which of my friends are accurate predictors of what I like, an algorithm should be able to curate that list for me.

Discovery can happen outside of my social network. There may be someone I’ve never met who is actually an excellent predictor of my tastes.

Everything I’ve liked or disliked in the past will help to inform the algorithm, which goes beyond potentially limited recommendations from friends.

Think of it this way: you’ve got your own personal concierge who knows you very well, is an expert in what you like, and also knows what everyone else has liked or disliked. That would be an incredibly powerful tool, because it harnesses me, my friends, and the broader collective knowledge.

Social discovery is a necessary step on the way to algorithmic discovery. Data scientists can only start to create algorithms when they have a large set of data about people’s likes and dislikes. With so many people sharing on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, that’s a foundation on which discovery engines powered by actual user preferences can be built.

Social discovery is exciting right now, but I don’t believe this will be an endpoint. And algorithmic discovery isn’t just a pipe dream. Movie recommendations on Netflix, news recommendations on Zite, and many other services with similar recommendation power are popping up. Personally, I look forward to more and more of these applications helping me with recommendations in all areas of my life, so that I can finally begin to discover what I’ve been missing.

Mark Johnson is CEO of Zite, a personalized magazine for the iPad and iPhone. You can follow him on Twitter at @philosophygeek.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/05/the-limitations-of-social-discovery/feed/0468466The limitations of social discoveryFancy beats Pinterest to social commerce, but did it sell its soul for cash?http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/30/fancy-beats-pinterest-to-social-commerce-but-did-it-sell-its-soul-for-cash/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/30/fancy-beats-pinterest-to-social-commerce-but-did-it-sell-its-soul-for-cash/#respondThu, 31 May 2012 00:48:43 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=463269Elegant discovery and sharing tool Fancy released a new iPhone and iPad app today, adding some simple social commerce to the mix that might just change the whole experience. If you haven’t heard of Fancy, think of it this way: Fancy is to Pinterest as Tumblr is to WordPress. It even has its own verb: […]
]]>Elegant discovery and sharing tool Fancy released a new iPhone and iPad app today, adding some simple social commerce to the mix that might just change the whole experience.

If you haven’t heard of Fancy, think of it this way: Fancy is to Pinterest as Tumblr is to WordPress. It even has its own verb: to fancy. Users upload images to the site much like at Pinterest, by uploading or using a bookmarklet to identify an image on a webpage. Then friends and followers can see the “fancied” items, follow you, comment, and “re-fancy” an image to post it to their own stream. Fancy is a bit simpler and a little bit more elegant than Pinterest, if that’s possible.

Of course, the analogy breaks down when you look at number of users. Fancy is still closing in on a million users, whereas Pinterest is well into the tens of millions, with over 100 million visitors to the site in January of 2012.

The key update today is commerce. And the big question is whether Fancy is prematurely optimizing for monetization over community and growth.

Buying things on Fancy, whether on the site or the app, is simple: see something you like (or fancy, if you will), and tap it. A buy now button appears; tap it, and you’re ordering the item. The app includes standard shopping cart technology so you can continue your journey through the items that you may or may not have bookmarked, and add additional products.

Users can download the new app here. I have one quibble: it only works in portrait mode, not landscape. Flipboard and similar tablet apps have conditioned users to the freedom to view content as they wish to see it, and it would be nice to have both options.

In a statement, founder and CEO Joe Einhorn mentioned that Oscar de la Renta sold $10,000 worth of product on Fancy in just one week. So Fancy has built an effective social commerce platform. But is it the right decision for the long-term future and growth of the community? Reviewing the app, I have some doubts.

If you look at the Fancy experience, pre-commerce (or even today, on any item that does not have a price tag), it’s much like Pinterest. It’s social, it’s playful, it’s all about discovery and sharing cool stuff.

Adding in commerce changes the equation somewhat. It reminds me of Dan Arielly, who warns in his book Predictably Irrational that mixing social norms and market norms is dangerous.

For instance, take a look at the image to the right. Without the “Book Hotel Now” title and price tag, it’s a great shot of a father, son, and elephant. Wow. But with the price tag … how much different does this image feel?

The danger is that Fancy is transforming art into an ad.

The difference is that between a social space and a store. It remains to be seen whether users will feel as happy socializing, sharing, and creating in a partly commercial space as they did in a purely social space.

App people photo credit: Shutterstock

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/30/fancy-beats-pinterest-to-social-commerce-but-did-it-sell-its-soul-for-cash/feed/0463269Fancy beats Pinterest to social commerce, but did it sell its soul for cash?Social discovery service Banjo hits 1 million users in just 9 monthshttp://venturebeat.com/2012/04/18/social-discovery-service-banjo-hits-1-million-users-in-just-9-months/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/18/social-discovery-service-banjo-hits-1-million-users-in-just-9-months/#respondWed, 18 Apr 2012 13:00:59 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=418124Banjo founder and CEO Damien Patton has held a variety of jobs in his life, but the career experience that he believes is paying off big at his current startup is the time he spent head mechanic on one of NASCAR’s top teams. “Down in the pit, you learn a lot about how to motivate […]
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Above: From zero to one million users in nine months flat

Banjo founder and CEO Damien Patton has held a variety of jobs in his life, but the career experience that he believes is paying off big at his current startup is the time he spent head mechanic on one of NASCAR’s top teams. “Down in the pit, you learn a lot about how to motivate people to work at an extreme speed under intense pressure, and I think I’ve brought that experience to Banjo’s engineering,” Patton told us during an interview yesterday.

The Silicon Valley startup has hit 1 million users in just nine months. It lets users import all their social networks and quickly browse through all that information based on their location. In part, Patton says, the company’s rapid growth was based on mainstream approach. “We launched from day one on iPhone and Android. We made sure it was available in dozens of languages,” said Patton. “We didn’t chase the early adopters out in the valley, we focused on the average user.”

Many users still aren’t comfortable sharing their location or being introduced to strangers around them based on an algorithm. The recent controversy over the Girls Near Me app shows how bad things can get.

“We knew from the beginning that building a social discovery app around a location platform would mean having to think seriously about privacy,” said Patton. “Our policy has always been simple. We respect all the settings you have in place on your social networks. We don’t show anything to people who would not already be able to see it. And we never download or store you contact list.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/18/social-discovery-service-banjo-hits-1-million-users-in-just-9-months/feed/0418124Social discovery service Banjo hits 1 million users in just 9 monthsStumbleUpon’s new Facebook Timeline app aims to spark conversation when you find cool stuffhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/04/12/stumbleupon-facebook-timeline-app/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/12/stumbleupon-facebook-timeline-app/#respondThu, 12 Apr 2012 17:00:15 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=415462Web content discovery service StumbleUpon is rolling out a new Facebook Timeline app today that allow you to share all the cool stuff you find during the day with friends and family. StumbleUpon’s service lets people discover and share new web content based on a broad spectrum of categories. Users click a “stumble” button to […]
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Web content discovery service StumbleUpon is rolling out a new Facebook Timeline app today that allow you to share all the cool stuff you find during the day with friends and family.

StumbleUpon’s service lets people discover and share new web content based on a broad spectrum of categories. Users click a “stumble” button to discover new content, and then have the option of voting and commenting on the selection. As of October 2011, the service has 20 million active users, and over 1 billion “stumbles” per month.

“What we’re doing with the new app is marrying the best parts of both services, StumbleUpon’s content discovery with Facebook’s socialization,” said StumbleUpon VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that the new app was a logical move for the company because so many of its own users are also constantly on Facebook.

Every time you either discover or give a “thumbs up” (a.k.a. like) to something, the new app will push that activity to your Facebook Timeline as well as the real-time news ticker feed. Adding a new channel, category, or StumbleUpon user also generates a notification within the Timeline. All your likes will get grouped together by category (as shown in the image above), which is probably more effective than the standard list of Facebook “likes” for showing people what you’re into.

Leibowitz said the company plans to add more functionality to the Facebook app as it makes sense based on user behavior, but for now there’s plenty to gain from just integrating activity updates. He pointed out that a person is likely to feel gratification for being the first among their social circle to share the funniest/weirdest/craziest thing from the web — which is something I agree with. The combination of StumbleUpon and the Facebook Timeline app has the potential to make your friends think of you as the foremost connoisseur of web content and curation.

And curating all the best links will naturally spark discussion. StumbleUpon has its own method for commenting on a discovered web page, but its far from the robust conversations that take place through Facebook.

“Each activity update for discoveries, likes, or favorites becomes its own social object that invites people to start talking about it,” Leibowitz told me.

The new Timeline app is specifically designed for current StumbleUpon users, but that doesn’t mean others won’t enjoy it vicariously through friends. And considering how good the service is at finding entertaining/interesting content, its bound to drive new people to sign up for StumbleUpon accounts and boost traffic. It’s also worth noting that community link sharing site Digg, which has content discovery elements similar to StumbleUpon, saw a huge boost in signups and traffic activity after launching its own Facebook app in February.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/12/stumbleupon-facebook-timeline-app/feed/0415462StumbleUpon’s new Facebook Timeline app aims to spark conversation when you find cool stuffDemo: Pinevio and trueRSVP offer new consumer technologieshttp://venturebeat.com/2011/09/13/demo-pinevio-truersvp-consumer-technologies/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/13/demo-pinevio-truersvp-consumer-technologies/#respondTue, 13 Sep 2011 23:03:31 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=331203Sixteen startups intend to break out big with consumers in the Consumer Technologies category at theDemo Fall 2011 conference in Silicon Valley. Here are two companies that presented today. Pinevio Pinevio is a tool that works with your social networks to help you find stuff that you might like, even if your friends don’t share your […]
]]>Sixteen startups intend to break out big with consumers in the Consumer Technologies category at theDemo Fall 2011 conference in Silicon Valley. Here are two companies that presented today.

Pinevio

Pinevio is a tool that works with your social networks to help you find stuff that you might like, even if your friends don’t share your interests.

For example, if you’ve got a fascination with sharks, you may have posted many links to shark videos on your Twitter and Facebook feeds. (Pinevio also works with Tumblr, YouTube and other social networks.) Pinevio would notice your predilections and suggest shark videos posted by other people, including many who you are not already following. The stream can be filtered so you can restrict it to video, images, or audio, or drill down to specific people.

“We will disrupt and democratize content distribution,” said Mindaugas Krisciunas, the co-founder of Pinevio, which launched today at Demo.

The company is based in Newcastle, U.K. and has raised 14,600 UK Pounds in funding from the Difference Engine, a business acceleration program; and 10,000 Euros from the founders.

TrueRSVP

Fei Xiao, the co-founder of Los Angeles-based truRSVP, can’t stand flaky people. She even took the Demo stage dressed as a bride whose groom flaked on their wedding. That’s why she and fellow University of Southern California students Grady Laksmono and Anna Sergeeva created truRSVP.

A Demo Alpha company, truRSVP’s technology aims to provide real estimates of how many people will attend an event. The founders say the goal is to increase the accuracy of RSVP’s, essentially telling you who’s a flake and who you can depend on to show up.

This introduces a new element of accountability to online invites. The company hopes to challenge Facebook Events and existing online event planning companies like Evite and PunchBowl.

Backed by OrganicStartup, the venture acceleration effort of angel investor Scott Sangster, trueRSVP combines priority invites, special algorithms and mobile apps. Its biggest challenge is going to be building a user base that generates enough invitations to take advantage of their “who will flake” prediction technology.

There’s still plenty to see at DEMO, and VentureBeat readers can get a special discount on registration for the remainder of the show at demo.com/VBDay.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/13/demo-pinevio-truersvp-consumer-technologies/feed/0331203Demo: Pinevio and trueRSVP offer new consumer technologiesStumbleUpon raises $17M as traffic climbshttp://venturebeat.com/2011/03/09/stumbleupon-funding/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/09/stumbleupon-funding/#commentsWed, 09 Mar 2011 20:33:38 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=247723StumbleUpon, the popular social service for discovering content, has raised $17 million in a new round of funding. This is the company’s second try at the startup game, having been acquired by eBay for $75 million in 2007, then spinning out again in 2009 because content recommendations and e-commerce aren’t exactly a natural fit. StumbleUpon’s […]
]]>StumbleUpon, the popular social service for discovering content, has raised $17 million in a new round of funding.

This is the company’s second try at the startup game, having been acquired by eBay for $75 million in 2007, then spinning out again in 2009 because content recommendations and e-commerce aren’t exactly a natural fit.

StumbleUpon’s main service is a browser toolbar that lets users “stumble” onto new content based on their previous likes and dislikes and on recommendations from other users with similar tastes. (Update: A company spokesman says, “Our web bar and mobile devices are the primary way people Stumble now.”) Even though the toolbar has been around for a while, traffic is still growing at an impressive pace. The San Francisco company says it now has more than 14 million registered users making more than 800 million content recommendations per month. It also says that its iPhone and Android applications have been downloaded more than 1 million times.

The funding comes from new investor DAG Ventures, as well as previous backers Accel Partners, August Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures.